Tag Archives: suburbs

What happens to “hipsturbia” when the wealthy start building 30,000 square foot homes?

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The “hipsturbia” of Hastings-on-Hudson, New York may never be the same with the pending construction of a 30,000 square foot home:

In this comfortable Westchester County community, many residents like to think of their village as the anti-suburb, jokingly calling it the Upper Upper West Side.

With painters, writers, jazz musicians and web designers liberally represented among the population of 8,000, the village displays an arty, slightly irreverent ethos. Subarus with bumper stickers that say “Make Dinner, Not War” outnumber the BMWs with vanity plates. Teenage rock groups are overshadowed by their parents’ bands; Housewives on Prozac is a local favorite. Residents are more likely to play down their wealth than to flaunt it.

So it came as a surprise when residents learned that a house was rising in their midst that was not only over the top for Hastings, but also called for superlatives even for Westchester, one of the richest counties in the entire nation.

The contemporary structure and accompanying pool house together measure more than 30,000 square feet. The underground garage is 3,572 square feet, larger than most of the Tudors and Colonials in town. On the application for a building permit, the construction costs were estimated at more than $40 million.

Maybe we could think of waves of gentrification: hipsters and creative types (think Richard Florida’s “creative class”) can represent a first wave that is willing to move into edgier (grittier, more authentic, cheaper) areas. However, what happens when these increasingly wealthy and educated areas start to attract the uber-wealthy? How does that big money fit with certain hipster values? The article ends by noting that the wealthy couple are Democratic and the big home features alternative energy, so perhaps it is less about money than it is about having the right progressive values. Big homes might be okay as long as the owners have the right morality about such homes.

The other interesting dynamic is that this all is taking place in a suburban setting, specifically in wealthy Westchester County. Hastings-on-Hudson is fairly suburban in its demographics: 85.2% white, the median household income is over $114,000 (the US median is around $50,000), and over 66% of adults have bachelor’s degrees. In other words, this suburban location may be hipsterish but it is certainly not that diverse in terms of race or social class.

Suburbanites mad at neighbors who don’t shovel their sidewalks

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Readers of the Daily Herald are upset about their suburban neighbors who didn’t both to shovel the sidewalks in front of their houses:

Nothing like hitting a nerve. Last week’s column about pedestrians in peril on unshoveled sidewalks provoked an avalanche of articulate emails. Let’s start with Nancy Johnson who writes, “I live in Elgin where shoveling sidewalks is not required and I struggle to trudge through the snow every winter to walk my three dogs.

“Two winters ago, I fell on an icy sidewalk that resulted from the homeowner never shoveling, and did serious damage to my back. I have tried putting friendly notes in neighbor’s doors reminding them to be good citizens and shovel, but to no avail,” Johnson said…

JR Beck joins three Hanover Park neighbors to clear sidewalk snow near a school and church.

“We all have snowblowers so the work is not as taxing as it once was a few years ago,” he said. “We have managed to keep the walkways clear for the blocks on which we all live.

“But no thanks to the snowplow jockeys who: plow in all the corners where the kids have to cross the streets; and drive so fast that the plows throw snow over the medians and onto the cleared walkways…

“When I replied that I was only talking about commercial properties — dead silence. I have seen people walking in the streets on extremely busy Golf Road and Algonquin Road during rush hour because sidewalks in front of these main commercial strips are impassible.”

A big problem in a really wintry season like the Chicago area just experienced. There are two possible routes of interpretation for this that come to mind:

1. This is another indicator of a lack of suburban community. People can’t be bothered to take care of parts of their property that others use. They put their own self-interest ahead of that of others. Kids may have special status and this makes sense since the suburban life is traditionally about raising children: the argument about kids getting to school or buses seems to be the most effective in motivating people to clear sidewalks.

2. This highlights the importance of roads and driving in suburban communities over the concerns of pedestrians. The suburban life is built around driving from place to place so this gets priority for snow removal. The average suburbanite or business owner may not think there are many pedestrians out there on the sidewalks so they don’t bother to clear them.

Neither reason is particularly positive but this is an ongoing issue in many places. In our residential neighborhood, in which I walk often and also walk out of (to get to the library, several stores, bank), I would estimate only 10-20% of sidewalks were clear, pushing walkers into the street. Even if I cleared my entire sidewalk (which I did throughout the winter), it doesn’t necessarily connect to anyone else who cleared their sidewalks.

The past importance of movie theaters to suburban downtowns and the difficulty of reviving them today

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The downtown movie theater was once an important part of suburbs but a number of these theaters have been difficult to revive in recent years:

Theater stories abound in the suburbs. The lavishly restored Paramount Theater in Aurora offers Broadway plays and big-name musical acts. The Arcada Theatre in St. Charles is another success story. Others — including the Wheaton Grand, Des Plaines Theater and Clearwater Theater in West Dundee — face uncertain futures after opening and closing multiple times in recent years…

Main Street theaters became popular in the late 1920s, when film was just emerging, Fosbrink said. Their construction boomed through the late 1930s and 1940s, particularly as suburbs took hold.

“Planning to have a theater in your town, or an opera house or something (for entertainment) was just as important as planning a city hall or fire station,” he said…

“People at this point in time are paying a lot more attention to how a theater can be a catalyst for economic development in a downtown business district,” Fosbrink said. “Theaters really can drive economic development, and we see a lot of that happening all over the country.”

Once a status symbol and source of local entertainment, these theaters are now possible ways to attract more people to a suburban downtown and hope they spend more money while they are there. Even though they aren’t really needed now (even the multiplexes have had a difficult time in recent years), they might anchor new entertainment districts where suburbanites don’t go to the city for culture but instead stay nearby.

It would be interesting to think about how many of these downtown theaters the Chicago suburbs could support. Particularly if they hope to all thrive, how much money is there to spread around?

Rare: urban Millennial claims to miss the suburbs

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This is not a piece from The Onion but rather a story at Atlantic Cities: a Millennial discusses why she thinks the grass may be greener in the suburbs.

I’m one of the thousands of Millennials who make up this new urban demographic. I left the comforts of Eden Prairie, Minnesota — a suburb of the Twin Cities and a community that has consistently been ranked one of the best small towns in America — for New York City. And while my move to New York was the right decision for a variety of reasons (or so I keep telling myself), I often wonder if the grass might indeed be greener—both literally and figuratively—had I stayed in the suburbs.While we’re on the subject, let’s talk about green space. Multiple studies have tracked the social, cultural, and emotional assets green spaces bring to a community, including mental health benefits and reduced rates of gun violence. While cities such as New York and Philadelphia have made tremendous gains in creating new and better public spaces in recent years — former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg presided over the biggest program of park building since the 1930s — too many urban communities are still “park deserts” compared to their suburban counterparts.

Another area where suburbs often trump cities is in the quality (or lack thereof) of their public schools. From the mass closing of public schools in Chicago to the “dizzying, byzantine system” eighth grade students and their parents go through to select a public high school in New York City, it is as hard as ever—if not harder—for parents to find quality public education for their children in large American cities. And this particular reality seems especially stubborn: students from suburban communities are more likely to graduate high school and go on to higher education than their urban counterparts, which of course in turn makes them more likely to get well-paying jobs as adults.

But the number one way the suburbs beat the city, especially for young people, is in affordability. After living in both Washington, D.C., and New York City, I can safely say that affording basic human necessities, such as shelter and sustenance—not to mention having a little fun here and there—is much cheaper outside of the city center. When paying $1,000 per month to share an apartment is a “good deal,” and when you don’t think twice about spending $14 for a single cocktail, what chance does a young city dweller have to actually save money? Not all cities are as insanely expensive as Washington and New York (Philly! Baltimore! Portland!), but when the mortgage on a spacious, four-bedroom home rivals the monthly rent of a cramped one-bedroom apartment, there really is no competition.

These are common arguments for the suburbs through American history back to the founding of some of the earliest suburbs in the mid-1800s: they provide green space and more nature, the ability to avoid “urban issues” like underperforming schools, and affordable housing compared to dense cities.

I have to wonder if her perspective is skewed just a little bit by growing up in Eden Prairie. As she notes, this is a community often marked as one of the nicer American suburbs. Not all suburbs are like this as they range from inner-ring suburbs adjacent to big cities to industrial suburbs to edge cities with lots of jobs to more exurban areas with bigger lots. Not all suburbs would have these three traits she claims are most important and others may offer features she does not discuss. On the whole, her arguments about the merits of the suburbs may be marked by a particular higher-end experience of American suburbs.

Americans across social classes spend a lot on housing and transportation

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Derek Thompson points out some interesting household expenditure data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics: Americans spend quite a bit on housing and transportation.

Families with radically different incomes—from lawyers and doctors down to high-school dropouts—all spend about half of it on homes and getting around, which suggests an historically tight relationship between marginal income growth and marginal spending growth on real estate and transportation. You get a raise, you shack up with roommates. You get another raise, you get nicer studio. A bigger raise and you move out to the suburbs and buy a house—commensurably increasing your spending on transportation (bigger car + gas).

This monopoly of housing/transit dominance is sticky for many reasons—America is big and has space for houses but zoning often limits development, leaving us with high relative housing prices and rents; suburban sprawl invites car ownership; infrastructure supports a car culture; our gas taxes are low and mortgage interest deductions are high; the list goes on—but it doesn’t have to be this way. Not every country spends half its income on homes and cars. They have other priorities, like the UK, where the typical family spends a walloping 20 percent of its income on the super-category of “fun stuff”: culture, entertainment, sports, alcohol, and tobacco. Or look at Japan, which spends more than twice as much as us on food consumed at home.

And where might this money go if it was not spent on these two areas?

Imagine what would happen if we didn’t spend $1 in $2 on houses and cars. It would be rocky for the real estate and auto industries who have come to rely on a steady stream of spending. But it would leave a lot of money left over other stuff—like smartphones, and dinners out with friends, and shoes whose fanciness belies our income level. This isn’t a vision of the future. It’s a description of the way a lot of young people live today, particularly educated twentysomethings who’ve moved to urban light areas (e.g.: newer subrubs within commuting distance of the city proper, like Arlington, Va.) where they can save on real estate, take public transit, and preserve enough of their lowish salaries to cobble together a connected and fairly social life outside work, if they have it. Maybe these trends are recession-era fads that will fade with the recovery. If not, it’ll be a big deal.

Owning a car and a home simply seem to be foundational features of modern America and the American Dream. The first offers independence and mobility. The second offers a private retreat from the harsh outside world and one’s own land to do as they please (though owners might choose to be part of homeowner’s associations that limit their options to enhance their property values). Being middle-class, a desired goal of many Americans, is tied to these two items. They also point to a person’s identity, representing one’s status and personal tastes.

All that said, Thompson hints at the possibilities if these foundational values (dating to roughly the 1910s and 1920s and then cemented in the prosperous post-World War II era when they became more attainable) fade and are replaced by others. It isn’t just an economic question of what happens to the auto industry or builders but rather a larger question about American social life: could be truly imagine an America without widespread praise and chasing after houses and cars?

Substantial “transit deserts” in the Chicago region

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A new report is critical of the state of mass transit in the Chicago metropolitan region:

Even major suburban job centers, such as the bustling I-90 Corridor from O’Hare to Schaumburg; the crowded Oak Brook area and booming Naperville, “are not well-served by transit,” and most jobs in the region cannot be reached in even a 90-minute commute, the analysis found.

The current system stands no chance of meeting the goal of doubling transit use by 2040 and “must be refocused with customer satisfaction as the primary objective,” according to the draft report prepared for the Northeastern Illinois Transit Task Force.

At the same time, there is little coordination of planning between the CTA, Metra and Pace, the report says.

The 15-member task force was created by Gov. Pat Quinn last August to reform the transit system after the controversy erupted over the awarding of ousted Metra CEO Alex Clifford a severance package potentially worth $817,000.

A few quick thoughts:

1. I like this term “transit deserts.” It implies that mass transit is a public good that many or all residents should be able to access.

2. Coordination across these transit groups would be helpful. But, this is a legacy of Illinois’ penchant for multiple government bodies. What is the motivation for each group to work together – and possibly sacrifice something – when they don’t have to and have separate pots of money?

3. The overall issue is also a legacy of the region’s development along railroad lines that radiated out of the city. The first railroad was constructed in the late 1840s and by the 1860s there was a strong network of rail connections. You can see this on the Metra System Map today. While this system was good for funneling people and goods back and forth from Chicago (a hub and spoke model with Chicago as the hub), it doesn’t provide connections across suburbs. This sort of intra-suburb infrastructure was not built when suburban development picked up in the early to mid 1900s and the opportunity was lost. Occasional plans still float around: see the Metra Star Line that would connect three major job centers, Aurora, Naperville, and Hoffman Estates, and O’Hare along a beltway rail line.

4. The major goal of “customer satisfaction” sounds interesting. While I don’t know what other goals were considered, it can take significant efforts to get suburbanites to warm up to the idea of mass transit. It might mean wealthier suburbanites give up driving, a task that can be onerous in Chicago traffic but an option that provides more perceived independence. It might mean suburban communities have to deal with more rail traffic – this has been an issue in past years with using the tracks that the Metra Star Line would run on – which means more delays for at-grade crossings (of which the Chicago region has many). It means making trains and buses and other options both convenient, comfortable, and relatively cheap, a difficult task in sprawling suburbs.

Computer models of the effects of gerrymandering on urban and rural voters

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A new computer simulation of voting patterns by geography in the United States suggests gerrymandering may not be the cause of Republican majorities in the House:

To examine this hypothesis, we adapted a computer algorithm that we recently introduced in the Quarterly Journal of Political Science. It allows us to draw thousands of alternative, nonpartisan redistricting plans and assess the partisan advantage built into each plan. First we created a large number of districting plans (as many as 1,000) for each of 49 states. Then we predicted the probability that a Democrat or Republican would win each simulated district based on the results of the 2008 presidential election and tallied the expected Republican seats associated with each simulated plan.

The results were not encouraging for reform advocates. In the vast majority of states, our nonpartisan simulations produced Republican seat shares that were not much different from the actual numbers in the last election. This was true even in some states, like Indiana and Missouri, with heavy Republican influence over redistricting. Both of these states were hotly contested and leaned only slightly Republican over all, but of the 17 seats between them, only four were won by Democrats (in St. Louis, Kansas City, Gary and Indianapolis). While some of our simulations generated an additional Democratic seat around St. Louis or Indianapolis, most of them did not, and in any case, a vanishingly small number of simulations gave Democrats a congressional seat share commensurate with their overall support in these states.

The problem for Democrats is that they have overwhelming majorities not only in the dense, poor urban centers, but also in isolated, far-flung college towns, historical mining areas and 19th-century manufacturing towns that are surrounded by and ultimately overwhelmed by rural Republicans.

A motivated Democratic cartographer could produce districts that accurately reflected overall partisanship in states like these by carefully crafting the metropolitan districts and snaking districts along the historical canals and rail lines that once connected the nonmetropolitan Democratic enclaves. But such districts are unlikely to emerge by chance from a nonpartisan process. On the other hand, a Republican cartographer in these and other Midwestern states, along with some Southern states like Georgia and Tennessee, could do little to improve on the advantage bestowed by the existing human geography.

Perhaps this introduces a new strategy for political parties: the need to have more evenly distributed support rather than large clusters of support. But, as the bottom of the article notes, certain redistricting strategies like in Illinois or Maryland can provide Democrats some help in spreading out the effects of their urban voters.

Confessions of a Community College College Dean: “Foucault, plus lawn care”

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The “Confessions of a Community College Dean” blog at Inside Higher Ed has this intro tagline for the author:

In which a veteran of cultural studies seminars in the 1990s moves into academic administration and finds himself a married suburban father of two. Foucault, plus lawn care.

Is it fair to say the implied contrast here is that this cultural studies scholar wouldn’t have imagined being part of suburban life? Knowledge of lofty French thinkers and maintaining a yard. I suspect there are many in academia who would have similar thoughts: I’m an expert in such and such field, study important things all day, and for sure won’t end up in the populist and anti-intellectual suburbs. Yet, some certainly do become suburbanites. How do they reconcile these two areas of life?

Suburban DuPage County to address record number of heroin deaths

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Following a record year for deaths by heroin, DuPage County has plans in motion for 2014:

The call for action in DuPage came months before the county surpassed its year-old record of 38 heroin-related deaths in 2012.Officials say there were 45 confirmed heroin-related deaths in 2013 in DuPage. And depending on the results of toxicology tests, Jorgensen said the final number could climb by one or two.

“If this was gang or gun violence in DuPage County and someone was being killed every eight days, I think the communities would be up in arms,” Wood Dale police Chief Greg Vesta said…

Heroin is more addictive and physically harmful than any other illegal drug, according to Jorgensen, who was a surgeon before becoming coroner.

That’s why, he said, it’s so important for DuPage to have a public education campaign targeted at heroin prevention. One goal of the effort will be to inform families about warning signs and where to find help. The education campaign — called “Be a Hero in DuPage” — will include a website and social media providing timely information, warning signs and resources, officials said.

DuPage County has long been one of the wealthiest counties in the United States. A story like this goes against that image. In a county that prides itself on suburban success, drug use that leads to death is likely viewed as more of an urban problem. Yet, the story for DuPage County and other suburban counties in the decades to come is that they will likely to see more urban concerns including poverty, crime, and more minorities and immigrants moving to the suburbs as they spread within metropolitan regions. It will be interesting to see how DuPage County tackles this issue…

Who wants to be in the “McMansion and minivans” category?

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Big data makes it possible to slice up Americans into all sorts of consumer categories like “McMansions and minivans.” However, how many would want to be in that category?

Acxiom provides “premium proprietary behavioral insights” that “number in the thousands and cover consumer interests ranging from brand and channel affinities to product usage and purchase timing.” In other words, Acxiom creates profiles, or digital dossiers, about millions of people, based on the 1,500 points of data about them it claims to have. These data might include your education level; how many children you have; the type of car you drive; your stock portfolio; your recent purchases; and your race, age, and education level. These data are combined across sources—for instance, magazine subscriber lists and public records of home ownership—to determine whether you fit into a number of predefined categories such as “McMansions and Minivans” or “adult with wealthy parent.” Acxiom is then able to sell these consumer profiles to its customers, who include twelve of the top fifteen credit card issuers, seven of the top ten retail banks, eight of the top ten telecom/media companies, and nine of the top ten property and casualty insurers.

Acxiom may be one of the largest data brokers, but it represents a dramatic shift in the way that personal information is handled online. The movement toward “Big Data,” which uses computational techniques to find social insights in very large groupings of data, is rapidly transforming industries from health care to electoral politics. Big Data has many well-known social uses, for example by the police and by managers aiming to increase productivity. But it also poses new challenges to privacy on an unprecedented level and scale. Big Data is made up of “little data,” and these little data may be deeply personal.

This is not new though the amount of data advertisers and others have – which is often given voluntarily on the Internet – may have increased in recent years. What might be more interesting, given that this is happening, is then to present Americans with the categories they are in and see how they react. Neither McManions or minivans have very good reputations. McMansions are seen as ugly houses owned by people who just want to make a splash, not own a quality house or participate in a close-knit community. Minivans signify suburban parent schlepping kids from place to place. Think the Toyota commercials from a few years back that tried to make owning a minivan cool. Put together these two functional objects that also serve as status markers and I suspect many people would not want to identify themselves as being in such an uncool group. Yet, there are plenty of people in such a group. Drive through any well-to-do suburb and both the homes and the parking lots (lots of Toyota and Honda minivans as well as a range of upscale SUVs – does this category include “McMansions and SUVs”?) reveal a certain lifestyle built around home, kids, school, and safety. It may be derided by outsiders and the people on the inside might not self-identify as such (and they might object to being lumped in a group – we Americans are individuals after all), but these are fairly popular choices to which marketers and businesses can then cater.